It is oftentimes desired to bevel the inner and outer borders of the open ends of vessels having generally eliptical configurations. For example, the sealing edges of rectangular television picture tube funnel and viewing panel parts have relatively sharp borders which are succeptible to bruise checking and it is, therefore, desirable to bevel such borders to reduce the possibility of such checking to the extent possible. This is particularly true for funnel and viewing panel parts for color television picture tubes since such tubes must be evacuated to a greater degree than similar parts for monochromatic television picture tubes. Furthermore, the viewing panels for color picture tubes are subject to much more handling than are their counterparts for monochromatic picture tubes and are, therefore, subject to greater chances of bruise checking.
Previously, the borders of the sealing edges of the television parts mentioned have been manually beveled in a time consuming and relatively expensive operation. It is desirable to eliminate the hand grinding or beveling of the borders of the edges and to provide a convenient means or apparatus for power grinding of the borders to reduce the time required for the grinding or beveling of the borders. Apparatus has been proposed for eliminating hand grinding as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,550,322, issued Dec. 29, 1970. However, the apparatus disclosed in the above-mentioned patent does not eliminate completely manual operations with respect to edge beveling and does not provide the bevel uniformity desired.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide novel method and apparatus for automatically transferring vessels into a beveling station for the beveling operation and transferring the beveled component out of the beveling station when the beveling is completed.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an improved edge beveling apparatus for the open end of vessels having generally eliptical configurations.
It is a still further object to provide an improved transfer mechanism which is particularly advantageous for use with the edge beveling apparatus disclosed herein, but which may be utilized for transferring articles into and out of a general operations station.
It is another object of this invention to provide an improved vacuum chuck arrangement.